HellmouthCon 2026 Brings Scenario Planning Back to Sunnydale High
HellmouthCon returns June 13-14, 2026, to Torrance High School, the real-world stand-in for Sunnydale High. This is not a fan event dropped into a convention hall with a few banners and a vendor aisle. It is a weekend staged inside one of the most recognizable Buffy the Vampire Slayer locations, where the school hallway, campus exterior, and courtyard carry the memory of prophecies, vampires, research sessions, terrible choices, kisses, and too often perhaps, an apocalypse postponed by a teenager with a stake.
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What is HellmouthCon 2026?
The event is presented by Fandom Charities Inc. and Hellmouth Events as an intimate, community-centered Buffy fan experience. Weekend passes include panels, programming, campus access, and the Sunnydale Mall vendor area, with photo ops, autographs, and fan experiences offered separately. The event page positions HellmouthCon as deliberately smaller than a mega-con, preserving the feel of a gathering rather than a crowd surge from another dimension.
That scale also reinforces the event’s philanthropic identity. HellmouthCon is produced by Fandom Charities Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The 2026 charitable focus includes the Ron Glass Memorial Scholarship Fund, the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network in memory of Camden Toy, and Rainbow Spaces for LGBTQIA2S+ youth. Buffy fandom has always carried a strange and useful mix of grief, humor, chosen family, scholarship, and survival. HellmouthCon turns that mix toward actual organizations doing work beyond the school grounds.
An overview of my session at HellmouthCon 2026:
Soothsaying and Fortune Telling: Learning How to Forecast the Future Through Scenario Planning
My session, Soothsaying and Fortune Telling: Learning How to Forecast the Future Through Scenario Planning, treats the Buffyverse as more than a pop-culture reference. It uses Buffy as a working model for thinking about uncertainty. The presentation begins with a simple proposition: scenario planning is not fortune-telling, but it can help people navigate the future. I share that scenario planning is a discipline focused on ordering perceptions, challenging assumptions, and creating strategic conversations through stories about alternative futures. A tool that might have given the Scooby Gang an edge…if they had only known!
The Buffyverse makes an ideal case for that lesson because Sunnydale never allowed certainty to sit still for long. Prophecies failed, rules changed, institutions collapsed, knowledge arrived late, and choices mattered even when destiny tried to write the script in advance. Scenario planning starts in that same uncomfortable space. The future is not predictable. More data does not remove uncertainty. A better forecast does not eliminate the Hellmouth beneath the school floor.
The talk asks a focal question fit for the Watchers’ Council if the Watchers’ Council had been better at methodology: How will magic affect the world in 2036? From that question, the session moves through the scenario planning process: identify context, driving forces, and uncertainties; prioritize the most critical uncertainties; build a scenario matrix; write scenario stories; identify implications; define early indicators; and keep observing, interpreting, and adjusting. The aim is not to pick one future. The aim is to keep more than one plausible future in view before decisions harden around a single story. This is also a great tool for storytellers of all types attending the con.
A core part of the session uses outside-in thinking. The presentation separates the world into layers of uncertainty. In Sunnydale terms, that means distinguishing global and interdimensional forces from the local realities of Slayer readiness, Watcher resources, demon logistics, occult economies, magical artifacts, and the density of vampire nests. Organizations often start strategic planning with what they control. Scenario planning starts farther out, with the forces over which they have no control, but must still understand and navigate to survive.
The Buffyverse uncertainties are organized through STEEP: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political. The examples are deliberately playful, but the underlying method is serious. Social uncertainties include destiny versus choice, institutional authority versus personal authority, and the inclusion or rejection of powered beings. Technological uncertainties include mystical versus scientific problem-solving, information management and misinformation, and access to power. Economic examples include magical markets, resource scarcity, and labor distribution among Slayers. Environmental uncertainties include dimensional instability, timeline integrity, apocalyptic climate shifts, and the nature of Hellmouths. Political uncertainties include Slayer governance, magic regulation, global power balances, and interdimensional diplomacy.
Those uncertainties become stories. The 2036 Buffyverse scenario matrix in the presentation explores four futures: The Coven State, Ember Wards, The Broken Lineage, and Shadows of Choice. Each scenario translates uncertainty into lived conditions. In one world, magical authority consolidates into control. In another, communities rebuild through mutual aid and decentralized spellwork. In a third, tyrants and demon barons replace institutions. In the fourth, radical freedom produces innovation and betrayal in equal measure. The names sound like they belong on a comic book cover, but the exercise is classic scenario planning: make the future vivid enough that people can argue with it.
That is the real point of bringing scenario planning to HellmouthCon. Buffy fans already know how to read for consequences. They know that a resurrection changes a character, a spell transforms a relationship, and a prophecy modifies behavior before it shifts events. Scenario thinking asks organizations, communities, and individuals to do the same kind of reading before the episode airs. What changes if a trend accelerates? What breaks if an institution fails? What becomes possible if power gets distributed? What happens when the Scooby Gang’s private assumptions no longer match the world outside the cemetery gates?
HellmouthCon provides the right home for an intriguing discussion. It places the talk inside the location that made Buffy feel both mythic and mundane: the high school as battlefield, classroom, archive, refuge, and ritual site. Sunnydale High was never just a setting. It was a reminder that the end of the world usually shows up in ordinary places, asking people to make tough decisions before they are ready.
The session is for Buffy fans, strategists, futurists, students, librarians, analysts, and anyone who has ever suspected that prophecy requires a little more preparation. There will be stakes. There will be uncertainty. There may be a crystal ball, but it will come with a warning label. The future need not be predicted to be engaged. It needs to be questioned, rehearsed, and watched for signs that the ground has started to open.
Sometimes the best way to think about the future is to start where the monsters already have a forwarding address.
HellmouthCon is a fan-generated charity event and is not affiliated with the Buffy, Angel, Disney, Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Mutant Enemy, or other rights holders. Its independence enhances the value of the gathering. Fans return to Sunnydale not because the Hellmouth is safe, but because stories, when taken seriously, still help people practice courage, grief, humor, friendship, and choice. Sometimes the best way to think about the future is to start where the monsters already have a forwarding address.
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